A possible solution may be to look at $ENV{'OSTYPE'}. The variable is set by the shell on most Unix systems and as such should serve your purpose.

Please realize that $ENV{'OSTYPE'} doesn't necessarily always contain the OS as well as the version. As an example, a machine of mine running FreeBSD 4.7 with perl 5.8.0 prints the following:

> perl -e 'print $ENV{'OSTYPE'}," ",$^O,$/'
FreeBSD FreeBSD
>

[download]
This is my only machine that reports without the version, but just a head's up in case.

Update: Ah, this is wonderful:
> uname
FreeBSD
>

[download]
So perhaps $ENV{'OSTYPE'} is just as good as attempting to capture the output from uname.

antirice    
The first rule of Perl club is - use Perl
The ith rule of Perl club is - follow rule i - 1 for i > 1

In reply to Re: Backward compatibility: $^O in perl 4 by antirice
in thread Backward compatibility: $^O in perl 4 by bronto

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